The real heart of open source lies in its potential to be greater than the sum of its parts, the capacity to leverage the talent and abilities of an entire community of developers and users who are striving towards a common goal, according to an editorial at Linux Insider.

Don't tell me that you're not entangling your political views into the GPL or FOSS as the whole. By the way, if you want to talk about truly free software, why don't you talk about truly free software (like public domain) instead of GPL software.

Some of your quotes:

The fact that no political party-with perhaps the exception of "libertarians", ie. conservative reactionaries

Wrong. Libertarians are the true liberals (in a classical sense). Leftists, socialists are the real reactionaries.

FOSS emodies a confrontation with the definition of private property-at its base it is a reformulation of the concept of property and the conceptualization of property and the consensus about what constitutes property and how the relationship of public-private is understood is the basis of society itself.

Here is where you really show your cards. Just explain how software bits (which are unique in its ability to be distributed) are somehow representative of private property as a whole? You really need to elaborate on that paragraph. "confrontation with private property". A confrontation with what property? That statement sure smells like communism to me.

With the advent of the personal computer "the ownership of the means of production" took on a meaning which hitherto was unknown. FOSS concretizes this freedom-it places the tools, ie. the means of production, in the hands of those who use it-and it does so in such away as to preclude any third party (ie. corporation or the State) from taking this freedom away.

Does that also apply to those that will sell their software without the source code? I'm going to guess you hate those kids in the early 80s that were making hundreds of thousands of dollars by hacking games on their Apples in their bedrooms. That's real empowerment. being an unpaid worker drone for the likes of Novell, Redhat, and IBM isn't empowerment. What the hell is wrong with getting paid for your work?

The subject of FOSS is however radically incommensurable with any kind of state control.

Yeah, software should be independent of state control - except not when it comes to Microsoft for some people because these braindead fools act like Microsoft forced people to buy their software.

when the kind of market freedom embodied by FOSS comes to fruition the kind of "free markets" envisioned by neo-liberal ideology will cease to exist-at least in the context of software development.

So are you making the assumption that FOSS will render proprietary software obsolete? We've heard this for years. FOSS works for our company because we can sell our closed-source, proprietary software on top of linux. I know you hate that. If the kernel didn't allow proprietary, closed-source apps, or GCC had some restriction on the code it generated, linux and gcc would be useless bits except to a couple hundred hobbyist kids.

I consider myself a member of the FOSS community. At this point in time a large number of fractions wish to co-opt the identity of this community for themselves. But all the vying for identity is rather mute-the FOSS community is not *an* identity-regarless of how one talks about it. We have the pro-this and the anti-that-but regardless of these identifications the copyleft nature of FOSS is a challenge to our societal definitions of property and how the relationship between private and public is understood. This challenge is not dependent upon the wish of some or many to see such as a challenge.

There's no doubt that Redhat, IBM, Novell, Sun and others are trying to jump on the bandwagon to further their own agendas. There you go again with "challenge to our societal definitions of property and hos the relations between private and public is understood". Once again, it smacks of a socialist political agenda.

This challenge consists therein that there is no legal or jurisprudence tradition which can adequately cope with copyleft. Inevitably the courts will have to develop a tradition of coping with copyleft and in so doing the understanding of copyright(patens and PROPERTY) will change. Who would have thought that the most successful sustained challenge to the concept of property would have come from a somewhat disgrunteled programmer at Americas most presitigious technical school. And who would have thought that this un-american train of thought would strike a chord of ressonance with people throughout the world.

Once again, "understanding of property will change".

Karl, maybe you can fool some of the kiddies around here with your pseudo-intellectual leftist diatribe, but it's totally clear that you (and others) have a leftist political agenda entwined with FOSS.

I'm a better spokesman for open source than you ever will be because at our company (oooh...evil private company producing proprietary code) has been selling boxes with linux for over 7 years. I can show people how you make a buck off of linux. All you can do is tell people that FOSS "will change our definitions of property"